Editorial: In murder exoneration, a revived debate

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/The Associated Press

Michael Morton awaited his exoneration in the Williamson County courthouse last week. He spent nearly 25 years in prison in his wife's beating death and was freed after DNA tests showed another man was responsible.

The grotesque injustice suffered by Michael Morton of Williamson County was a travesty — nearly 25 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

But, he pointed out after gaining his freedom based on DNA evidence, the travesty could have ended in tragedy.

“I thank God this wasn’t a capital case,” Morton said last week. “I only had life.”

That’s the essential argument for not adding to the list of 475 executions that have been carried out in Texas since 1982. Even well-meaning officials and juries too often have gotten it terribly wrong. The inevitable damage needs to be minimized, and substituting life in prison for the irrevocable death penalty is one fundamental way.

Morton, now 57, was convicted in the slaying of his wife, Christine. Prosecutors pushed a bogus theory that he flew into a rage, beat her to death and left for work. They served up forensic evidence that now appears to have been oversold, judging from a trial analysis in the Austin American-Statesman.

Morton is the 45th Texas man whose conviction unraveled in the face of modern DNA tests, according to the New York-based Innocence Project. Morton’s case is one of a handful that involved murder, and it wasn’t prosecuted as a capital crime.

But Texas’ death row has not been immune from error. For the most recent, witness the fabricated case against Anthony Graves in the sensational murders of six in Burleson County, a conviction that unraveled last year because justice officials smelled the stench of injustice and bothered to find the source. It was in the office of a scheming former DA.

Morton left the courthouse last week with a judge’s apology ringing in his ears: “You do have my sympathies,” he said.

What a tragedy it would be if, some day, a judge were able to deliver those words only in memoriam.

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